I use Divine Protection on every pull, and whenever the cooldown is up on bosses, so many times during the course of a fight. Especially on trash pulls where I know I'll be taking a lot of damage, let's say in a 5 man group composition lacking in CC, I'll use it as soon as I get in enemies' range. It's a 1 min. cooldown, and only a 20% damage reduction, so I see no reason to keep it for tight situations.

Guardian of Ancient Kings I keep for tighter situations. Whenever I'll drop below 35% health and the healer is low on mana I will pop it. Depending on my threat lead, I'll usually switch to Seal of Insight at the same time and start spamming WoG. I mostly spam WoG whenever I have a sufficient threat lead anyway, and Seal of Insight on bosses where I take particularly heavy damage (and if once again, I have a sufficient threat lead). I'm a heavy WoG user, any party member dropping below 35% has a high chance of getting healed by my WoG.

Ardent Defender is for even tighter situations. The catch with this cooldown is you'd like to see it save your ass by preventing a death, but it also has a damage reduction component to it, so even if you didn't "die" while using it, you haven't necessarely failed. Now I use it whenever I drop below 10% health. At -10% health, if GoAK is also available, I'll pop both.

Lay on Hands is the last resort. I use it when everything else is on cooldown and I know the next hit I'll take has a chance to kill me. Once again, something I try to keep for when I'm below 10% health. I'll spam WoG until I can't hold on anymore and just go back to 100% health in an instant.

Divine Guardian is something I keep for situations where the group will take heavy AoE damage. I don't use it that often, but I'll use it everytime it's called for. I'll almost always use it in conjunction with Holy Radiance. I don't use Holy Radiance every cooldown due to its heavy mana cost, but whenever I see most of the group go down too much in HP, I'll pop it. Every cooldown if need be, but I won't use it if the situation does not call for it.

Edit : As for trinkets, I only use Heart of Thunder at the moment (and I am looking to replace it ASAP). I'm not a huge fan of cooldown trinkets, especially the ones who give you a health boost. I prefer those with on use extra avoidance, or with passive procs. I keep the Heart of Thunder use for when I drop below 10% health.

All your mobs are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.

I use DP pretty much any time I'm in combat (that isn't ending in 5 seconds) and the cooldown is up. I use AD when I'm in combat and my life is <50%, and I think that the healer needs a boostI use GaNK when I'm getting the crap kicked out of me. I use Holy Radiance in AoE damage situations for the party (pretty much any AoE pull now) I use Lay On Hands when I know that if I don't use it, I'm going to die. I don't use WoG as often as some, and I very rarely WoG other players. I don't use SoI often unless I REALLY REALLY need the healing. I keep On Use Trinkets bound close to my other Cooldowns. I'm currently sporting Some ogre tooth and I Love this trinket very much. it works out to be ~14-15% block on use.

Other Cooldowns I use: Divine Plea. I will use this quite often. Normally, before pulls I will Div Plea - Inq - Pull. for a good threat lead.

Please don't let me seem ungrateful because I am. That was some very detailed info on CD's. A lot of which I use myself. However I fear this might turn into a topic "not" gear related. I am more so interested in information on trinkets and when people decide to go with sta/sta trinkets, sta/mit trinkets/ or mit/mit trinkets. Just looking for some theories some people use is all.

fuzzygeek wrote:I don't generally equip avoidance trinkets, as I'm kind of biased against them, especially under the new damage model.

I would have thought under the new damage model that avoidance would be attractive than it was under the old model, since it is effectively 100% mitigation.

From a stat budget perspective, it's not as good as mastery since dodge and parry are more expensive and suffer from diminishing returns, but from a damage model perspective, I think dodge and parry still do the most to reduce overall incomming damage.

I used to think that the tanking community call dodge and parry avodance rather than mitigation. Has that changed recently? Anyway, my strategy for trinkets is easy. For fights with heavy magical damage, I use stamina trinkets. For fights with heavy physical damage, I use armor trinkets (those wotlk ones). I belong to the type who don't want to rely on randomness when tanking. I guess mastery trinkets could be equally good for mitigating physical damage.

The fact is, in wotlk, I was using those armor trinkets when I sit at 39k armor without them. Now I only have like 33k armor fully buffed, and I don't see a reason why I shouldn't use the same armor trinkets.

Avoidance is a subset of mitigation. Anything that makes you take less damage is mitigation. The only sort of mitigation other than avoidance is armor, really. Oh, and block. If block isn't avoidance, anyway... the lines are getting a little fuzzier.

Anyway, at the topic - I think the best thing you could probably do is have an EH set with two stamina trinkets and a mitigation set with mastery or avoidance trinkets. Some fights call for EH, others for mitigation, though I personally haven't really seen strong variations between these. I heard the Chromaggus hydra boss (forget his name) is a big EH check, but for most fights with heavy raid damage you probably want mitigation trinkets on.

I wouldn't really worry about that until you're graduating from heroics, though. For heroics I'd lean toward mitigation, personally.

I like to maintain multiple gear sets for differing situations. I have a stam set, armor set, block set, tps set, and average set. For me this is mostly just for fun as I don't do much more than heroics anymore and my average set is fine for any heroic in game, but when raiding being able to swap between focused sets depending on boss mechanics or mix and match if needed is a huge bonus. To give you an idea here are the sets that I am currently working toward.

So, my tps set hits expertise soft cap then hit cap then expertise hard cap and sacrifices where necessary to reach these numbers. I currently run an expertise trinket(heroic) and hit trinket(from a normal instance). Once I can get hit cap w/o the trinket I have another expertise trinket in my bag ready to go.

Block set is full mastery wherever possible then avoidance. Double mastery trinkets. I currently have a trinket that procs spell power, but will be replacing this once my TolBarad rep is high enough. My other is the JC only mastery trinket.

Armor set is focused on armor and then block stats. Double armor trinkets. Go get the 245 ilvl armor trinket from WotLK; it is OP compared to Cata armor trinkets. Then there is also nice armor trinket from heroics.

Stam set is just pure stam/health. The bigger the number over my green bar the better! Double stam trinkets.

My average set is a mix of the above stats. I try to maintain as much block/avoidance as possible while also maintaining at least close to the hit cap and expertise soft cap. For this set stam is not necessarily a major concern, but I currently use the JC only stam trinket with the dodge clicky in my second trinket slot with the JC only mastery trinket in the other slot.

So, at the moment I have in my bags 2 expertise trinkets, 1 hit trinket(would like another), 2 mastery trinkets, 2 stam trinkets, 2 armor trinkets, 1 avoidance trinket(would like another), and 2 strength trinkets(mostly for ret offspec set). I find that trinkets are the easiest way to customize a set and having options will keep you prepared for anything(also keep you from ever having spare bag space lol).

I don't know where these new definitions are coming from again and why.

Edit: In fact, I just got done saying in another thread that I didn't think there were many people confusing this. But apparently either I'm not up with the times, or I was wrong. The post a few earlier explains why people keep saying they have "85% avoidance". I knew what they meant but never felt like making a fuss over it. Now I'm fussy

I think to go back to the avoidance issue in cataclysm (delete this if this is just extending a belabored conversation)...ciderhelm had a forum thread on the main forums long ago about the nature of stacking avoidance and armor - the conclusion was basically the more you have of a stat, the more advantageous it is to stack more of the stat (this was disregarding DR and talking about percentages)...like...if I have 70% avoidance, and I add 1%, I'm reducing 1/30th of the damage, whereas at 30% avoidance, I'm reducing only 1/70th of the incoming damage. And on and on.

I think my personal read on it was that without bringing you substantively closer to some form of block cap, or allowing you to take an extra hit consistently, the high dr on avoidance devalues say...3% dodge in a world where you're sitting at 35% avoidance. There's just very little real world benefit of going from 35% to 38% avoidance. It's the lack of consistency vs eh and stam trinkets which are more predictable. Maybe on a pack of mobs if mastery weren't so cheap to stack or there were some terrible ms effect.

[edit] - after looking into it a little more, the porcelain crab, which was one of the avoidance trinkets being talked about, has some effectiveness as a mitigation trinket, if you reforge to mastery. The proc gives ~21% block, so if you WERE going to ditch out on stam trinkets it wouldn't be terrible.

Last edited by pfunkmort on Wed Dec 29, 2010 12:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

inthedrops wrote:Has this whole avoidance/mitigation defintion come up again? I thought this was resolved 5 years ago. Why is it being brought up again? Did I miss a memo somewhere?

Avoidance - has a chance to reduce damage

Mitigation - ALWAYS reduces damage

Once you are block capped call block mitigation until then it is avoidance.

Others have sort of said it, but again

Block capped or not, block is always mitigation. At 102.4% it's just GUARANTEED mitigation, instead of a chance at it and someone said, and can be counted as Effective Health as you'll never take a 100% hit.

Bump! I'm also pretty interested in that trinket choice. If I compare the agi-on-use and the str-on-use, I get lots of threat and some avoidance, or some threat and lots of avoidance. But I am also pretty tempted by the resistance one. Thing is, I haven't set foot in raids yet, and I don't know how useful it'll be. The agi-on-use one will be a great all-around trinket, but not sure if there are enough situations to justify buying the resistance-on-use one.

Also, I don't know, maybe Rating Buster is wrong. But 1600 agi was around 4% dodge for my values. My belt with 170 dodge was giving 0.80% dodge, so that means 850 dodge for 4% dodge. Ok but if agility gives 75% the value of dodge rating, these numbers are way off, as it makes them more like 50% the value of dodge, not 75%.

Not that I have a lot of other avoidance trinkets to choose from - I've only run each heroic once or twice, and none have dropped. I have not crunched the numbers, but Tia's grace in particular seems awesome - it nearly always seems to be stacked up to 10, giving me 340 agility.

EDIT: forgot about unsolvable riddle being on use - that makes it much better than I thought. Memo to self - don't post at 4am.

Last edited by econ21 on Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:36 am, edited 3 times in total.